The Winchester Revision: Chapter Four
4
There are monsters thundering at his door like the knuckles of the devil himself (if it had been the case that the devil ever knocked, which he didn't, as Chuck well knew) and clouds gathering blackly on the horizon.
Chuck lifts his pounding head up from the haven of his arms and glares out the storm door where the sun is shining as it's been shining for the past four days, warm and unstoppable. They've been experiencing seasonally appropriate and delightful weather in Italy for a week now and the forecasts haven’t yet foreshadowed a single drop of rain. If Chuck ventures out of his front door (he hasn't in twenty-four hours because the sun hurts his eyes and burns his skin) he can hear the crowds down at the beach. Tourists and ambitious locals and screaming children.
The monsters are all beneath this peaceful clamor, they are smiling and chattering and belching out the black mist that begins to fog up Chuck's mind. And Chuck, who wants nothing more than to curl up under a blanket somewhere and close his eyes and let himself be taken by the beasts, knows he isn't writing fast enough. The ending is still so far away it's practically unreachable.
It was foolish of him to think he could write the monsters away. Only a writer could be capable of such destructive pride. A world with no monsters was a world full of defenseless people. He doesn't know why, cannot find the core of the argument, but he is watching his revision as it is shaped and his conclusion is undeniable. The world is better, somehow, with monsters in it. It is brighter; it has a chance to be saved. But that is not why he cannot get rid of them.
And there is still the question of the love story.
Chuck sucks summer air in through his nostrils, (it's so heavy his lungs have trouble moving it) and drains his coffee mug. It's cold, black sludge, unsweetened because he's been making it himself and he can't remember where he put the sugar. He only drinks it for the caffeine buzz to say awake. Without it he begins to drift off and his impossible dreams try to take him away. He has to fight his way out of sleep like it’s a closed coffin.
Chuck starts up his computer and, while he waits, shuffles his way into the bathroom. It is the one room he hates more than his yellow walls because the mirror is there, reminding him that he looks like shit and is only going to look shittier before the end. Today his eyebrows, of all things, are nearly gone. As if they crawled away in the middle of the night. And when Chuck reaches up to brush a hand through his hair his fingers come away with clumps of hair between them.
He throws away his comb and goes wandering around the house until he finds a pair of scissors. He grabs his shaving cream and his razor. Then, shivering in the sterile box of tiles, leaning over the sink, Chuck shaves his head. He isn’t inclined to wait until it all falls out on his own, stuck to his pillow or floated to the kitchen floor.
There are only two real endings for lovers in fairytales: Either they live happily ever after, or they are eaten alive.
x0x
Dean had his Math a Troglodyte Could Do class at ten a.m. on Mondays, Wednesday's and Fridays and his Physics that would Make Neils Bohr Weep, class right after it. On Wednesday's they were followed by the three hour encore, The Agony of Neil's Bohr, in Practicum, which was his physics lab. This meant that there was one day out of every week where Dean Winchester was grumpy, confused, and hungry as hell by three in the afternoon because there was no other window for lunch.
In retrospect, that didn't make him feel any better when his feminist professor caught him swearing up a perfect storm at a mostly innocent ATM at three fifteen. Really the ATM was little more than a bystander to the entire predetermined fuck-parade that was Dean's day to day existence and it probably didn't deserve the laundry list of lewd things Dean called it. However, even with the universe and all its own attendant complications (black holes, expansion, certain death for everyone) in perspective, Dean was unable to react rationally to the vicious dashing of all his turkey sandwich dreams.
The hallway swallowed up his hisses and spat them back out as shouts that went rebounding into every corner like cries for help.
"I believe our friend here lacks the necessary orifices for what you're suggesting," said the voice from behind him.
Somewhere, in another life, Dean was a really cool spy, or a badass cowboy who threw punches at things that spooked him first and asked questions later. In this life he was a college student with low blood sugar who jumped and smacked his elbow off the wall.
"DUDE! Ow-" Dean's bank card made a slapping sound as it hit the ground and vanished beneath the ATM. "Damn," he stooped to fish it out, cringing as he felt the dust work its way under his fingernails. He glared up at Castiel.
"You sound thwarted, Dean." Castiel observed.
Thwarted was Dean's position exactly. Also, frustrated, doomed, cursed and damned.
Not to be dramatic.
"I was just about to grab a late lunch, but-" Dean made a short gesture to the fluttering, pink out of order sign.
"I see," a pause as Dean barked a triumphant HAH and emerged from the shadow of the ATM with cobwebs and his debit card in his fist, "I was actually on my way to do the same when I heard you shouting. Why don't you join me?" Castiel had a smile that was made of gentle understandings and cozy afternoons. His eyes, however, were made of something sharper and more crystalline. Something that could cut.
Dean had been assiduously avoiding this particular professor as a necessary self-defense and those eyes were the reason. But now that he was standing right in front of the man, alone in the cavernous hallway of the library basement, he found he couldn’t quite put a name to the threat. There was only a vague feeling that came with Castiel’s presence, it felt like learning that rocks were mutable and oceans were static. Dean found himself answering,
"Sure,” even though he knew that, somehow, Castiel was a trap door. That was almost part of why he did it, for the sheer perversion of acting against his best interests, of walking along that precipice. Besides, he absolutely could not go on to face Virginia Wolfe in two hours without so much as a Snickers in his system.
As Castiel reached out for a doorknob, Dean noticed the angry red network of scabs over the knuckles on Castiel's right hand. They were crisscrossing, dipping to the webbing between his fingers and splitting a across the back of his hand; like the dude had played bloody knuckles with a cactus and lost.
Dean flexed his own hand and felt the pulling of the skin. He wondered what part of Castiel's apartment had a fist shaped hole in it.
Castiel had seen him looking and had paused. In that moment his eyes lost their edged quality and became concave, like little wells or little wounds, and Dean forgot that he was supposed to be the misfortuned and mysterious one. He reached out to take Castiel's hand and pull it closer for inspection.
The longest scab ripped down like a comet tail over the middle finger, red and puffy.
"Did you even disinfect this?" Dean asked. The old phosphorescent light above their heads cast down a sickly yellow glow that was not quite enough to see reliably by. Dean ran his fingertips, very gently, over the surface of the scabs and followed their progress thoughtfully.
"I washed it," Castiel said, petulant like Sam. His fingers twitched but he didn't take his hand back.
"Cas," Dean began and felt a shift in the air. Cas gazed at him, startled and Dean changed his direction at the last second: "Is it family?"
A shot in the dark. But if he was on the mark Cas would understand his meaning.
A pensive silence followed where Cas looked down at their joined hands and scraped the pads of his fingers tips over the terrain of Dean's palm.
"No," Cas answered softly. It didn't make Dean feel any better, he'd been privy to lots of "not family" before and it didn't make it any less terrible. "It's the family that lives below me, there's a little girl. She's eleven or twelve I think, but..." Cas made a motion that wasn't really a shrug because shit like this wasn't something you could shrug about.
"Sometimes there's nothing you can do," Dean said and wondered who the hell had told him that before. He'd never bought that bullshit.
Cas didn't buy it either.
"I don't think you believe that, Dean." His eyes were sharp again, boring down, invasive. In most instances Dean would have pushed back, but he was still holding Cas' hand and despite the proximity of their bodies and the loneliness of the hall he felt like he was in the presence of an old friend he'd somehow forgotten about.
Or, well...
Cas' other hand was coming up, reaching directly, fingers resting lightly on Dean's sternum while his mouth said Dean's name, not a question, a gentle command.
Perhaps not a friend.
Dean swallowed the dust gathering on his tongue. "No," he said, and then thought he might as well speak the truth while he was here. "But sometimes you can't help."
Cas frowned at him, and then exhaled. The gust pushed them apart and they were standing on their own sides of the conversation again, a student and a professor.
"I guess that's the difference," said Castiel and pushed open the door with a gesture for Dean to proceed him.
xxx
Behind the apartment building where Dean lived there was a thick looking patch of woods. It rose up on the other side of a stone wall, tall and dark, making promises about lost travelers and wolves. Lichen grew on the north facing roots. Thorns and Azalea bushes clustered and made even the conception of a path impossible. But all that was just bluster and illusion, really the trees stretched back for about a hundred yards and then cut off in a straight line at the edge of a grassy knoll that was the far, forgotten corner of a graveyard.
Dean went out the back door and through the woods and stood in the un-kept grass among the headstones in the dusty mist of a gray Thursday. Graveyards were quiet places, undisturbed and unconcerned. Dean liked to share the unburdened hush of dead people.
He had a book in his hand. It was a library book from the school. The cover was stained and it was a little thing, about eighty or so thick-papered yellow pages. But in the cold air of February and the chilling damp of the afternoon his fingers could barely support its weight. Castiel had given it to him yesterday at the end of class, just as Dean was about to walk safely by.
Two or Three Things I Know for Sure, by Dorothy Allison.
Dean took it home with him and then, when nothing was on TV, he’d actually sat down to read it.
And he'd read it. The whole thing.
Not only was this unheard of in the annals of Dean Winchester’s Giving a Shit, but now-fuck Castiel and his deep blue eyes like a deep blue sea and fuck you very much too, Elton John-he couldn't stop thinking about it and he was asking questions he'd never thought to ask before and there were, just maybe, thoughts happening inside him. There were also, perhaps, tears breaking at the corners of his eyes because of all the implications of his newly acquired information and because he didn't know what to do. He didn’t know if there was action he should be taking. And worst of all he didn’t know, anymore, if he was capable of find the resolution.
Dean sat down, the grass was damp with melted snow and freezing but he was wearing an old pair of jeans and he didn't really give a shit. He needed to be further down, closer to the earth and tree roots and bones.
He opened the book, let it fall open to any page.
Behind my carefully buttoned collar is my nakedness, the struggle to find clean clothes, food, meaning, and money. Behind sex is rage, behind anger is love, behind this moment is silence, years of silence.
Basically it said that Dean was wrong, that Dean was a coward.
It also said that Dean wasn’t alone.
xxx
Dean's worst nightmare was actually a memory of one week during his sixteenth summer. It was the first time Dean understood just how inadequate he was for the job that had been handed to him.
John Winchester walked out of the house on a Monday night in June and didn't come back the next morning. After the second day, Dean had been convinced he was never going to come home at all.
Sammy had loved the whole week. Dean could remember how Sam had slammed his way down the stairs every morning, whammed shut every cabinet or door he closed, how he'd reveled in the noise. Dean let him listen to whatever radio station he wanted and he showed Sam how to use the turntable and they'd spent every evening listening to CCR and Led Zepplin, over and over again, with the volume turned up just enough as they sat on the floor next to the speakers and drank soda.
"I wish he would be gone more," Sam had said, grinning dementedly on his sugar high, drumming out Have you Ever Seen the Rain with a pencil and an empty soda bottle. Dean had been careful not to look up from where he was sorting through the other albums because Sam didn’t know how close they were.
Dean never told Sam how close they’d come, what a near miss it was. That was the point, Sam had a big brother so he didn’t have to know. And so he that would never have to be alone.
They were nearly out of food by Wednesday, and Dean had begun to worry about money in a serious way as he stood in the kitchen making the first of a marathon of peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. He'd had job applications out, but he was sixteen and all his jeans had holes in the knees and he'd blown off half of the interviews for various disasters of the Winchester nature. Dean had no real skill sets anyway other than cars and cussing, and he wasn't really a people person. He had a bad habit of using his sense of humor as a defense mechanism and tended to laugh at the wrong jokes and smile at the wrong times.
He couldn’t have called that cops, though John Winchester had officially been a missing person for at least twenty-four hours by then. If Dean had gotten official assholes involved, then they would have wanted to know, officially, who was taking care of Sam and Dean while John was gone. And if they had discovered the answer was: Sam and Dean, then they would have taken Sammy away.
He was licking stray peanut butter off his thumb, trying to screw the lid back on the jar with one hand, when he suddenly thought of a woman named Ellen. Who had a kind smile and hands like a mother, who gave up one kind of shame for another, and who wasn’t ashamed at all.
Dean thought about her until they ran out of bread and Dean had to use some old and questionable tortillas that were in the back of the fridge. And then, by Saturday night, he’d had to be done waiting. He waited until Sam passed out on the couch a little after ten and he went upstairs and dressed himself carefully. Put on a tight, black t-shirt and his best pair of jeans, left his belt on his bed so they would ride low on his hips. And then he slipped into his leather jacket, put it on like a thick second skin, and walked out of the house.
Dean didn't glance back as he walked, he knew what he would see. The curtain was open to the living room, and Sam a dark shape on the couch, slumped over like jelly fish, face flickering different colors in the light of the television. Dean went down the streets and passed all the bars he'd frequented for the pool tables and kept walking down until the streetlights grew farther apart and he reached a place with parking meters and closed bistros and long dark alleys.
The bar was called Crossroads.
It was a clean establishment, with high, polished barstools and beautiful men and women working behind the bar and an honest-to-god piano man in the corner. The sign was carved and seared wood, with the same dark stain as the rest of the bar. The window was wide and clean and expensive. Dean didn't go inside. The bars he’d been to in the past never asked for an ID and so Dean had never bothered to procure one.
The street was busier than he'd expected, cars buzzing by, people walking.
Dean leaned against the lamppost by the bar window, his hands in his pockets, and tried to look bored. He ignored the glances and ignored the hammering of his insides. But it was hard, with nothing but a black sky to look at.
At least an hour passed. Dean's pounding heart was beginning to slow with the dwindling traffic of the street.
Dean let his head fall to rest against the cold metal of the pole.
"Are you waiting for someone in particular?"
Dean’s spine snapped him upright.
They were well dressed, standing arm in arm. He was tall and handsome with careless blond hair and long fingers and she was draped in black, her dark hair twisted artfully on top of her head. Together they were striking, side by side. They weren’t dressed for the bar.
Dean shrugged. His heart was hammering again. The woman was smiled at him, the fingers of her left hand twisting and pulling at the strap of her dress as if even its inconsequential material was an annoyance.
"Because," the man continued, "we were thinking you might be waiting for us." He walked closer, the woman standing behind him, and put a hand under Dean's chin. "You'd be a good fit," the man looked over his shoulder at his-the brush of cold metal on the finger against Dean's neck-wife. She smiled, white teeth behind her sunrise lips, and sucked the pad of her thumb into her mouth.
Her eyes were yellow in the lamplight. She looked at Dean like she might like to eat him alive and it made Dean's heart strain in his throat against the soft brushing hand of the husband. The man had easy, soft blue eyes, the kind that were easily lied to. But he was watching his wife, and it wasn’t until she nodded that he drew Dean away from the shadow of the pole.
"It's a five minute walk to our hotel,” he said. He took his hands off of Dean and stood with his hands in his pockets. The woman stood beside him. They were waiting for Dean to accept or decline. It was a very civilized deal.
Dean flashed them a lightning grin.
"Let's go," he said, and walked back under the waiting umbrella of the husband's arm. The wife's soft hand ushered him forward at the small of his back. They strolled down the street with Dean between them until they came to the parking lot of the hotel. It was shaded from the streetlamps, covered in shadows and black BMW's. As they stepped over the flower garden and made to move around the building to the front door, the husband leaned in to trail his fingers over Dean's face and dip them into Dean's mouth.
Dean was startled at first by the invasion. But he reminded himself what his part was here, and he stopped walking to suck the taste of almonds off the man's finger and back him up against the wall. The man smiled as Dean reached out and pushed a palm against the dip of his hipbone. Dean bit gently at the knuckle between his teeth and moved deliberately, careful not to let the trembling in his stomach show.
"Bold," said the husband appreciatively.
Dean shrugged and then froze at the warm gust, like a tiger's careful breath, on his neck. He felt the heat of a warm body behind him and caught the scent of vanilla and strawberries. She didn't say a word, she didn't even touch him, but slipped in close and blew on the bottom of his ear. Dean could feel her toothy smile in the shape of his sudden, irrational, panic.
He was hunted. The shiver that crept up Dean's spine washed his mind blank with cold terror. The husband's hands, tracing down Dean's chest, were unfamiliar and strange and there were things he would take away from Dean if Dean allowed it. The husband had changes in store for Dean. But the woman, her breath trailing to his shoulder, her nails gentle and teasing on the back of his neck, would break Dean apart just to see what was inside.
Dean couldn't breathe, he stumbled sideways, out into the free air away from her mint mouth and sweet wine lungs.
The husband frown, something like concern peaked under his arousal and pushed himself away from the wall. His face, though shadowed, betrayed his humanity.
"Are you alright, kid?" he asked.
Dean shook his head, his wooden tongue rattling in his mouth. I'm not-he thought to say, I'm not-it was as if a hand had closed around his throat.
The woman tipped her head, her eyes were an icy hazel, but they flashed yellow again under the influence of a passing car. She opened her mouth, hand outstretched, a small frown marring her features. What would she say? Dean back away and ran before she could speak. If her scent, her breath put so much weight on him, what power would her words have?
He ran all the way home.
I'm not a whore. He couldn't even gasp the words out to the lonely trashcans of his home street.
Sam woke up at the sound of the front door. He sat up and looked over the back of the couch while Dean shrugged out of his jacket and into the warmth of his own house.
"Dean?" he asked, "where'd you go?"
“Nowhere,” said Dean. And in a way it was true. In the end he’d run right back to where he’d started.
John came home the next morning. Just strolled in the door like he was a father again; sober, arms full of grocery bags and wordless apologies.
Dean cried in the shower he was so shaken and relieved. He understood how lucky he’d been this time, and he understood that someday his luck would run out.
Someday he would hesitate, fail to act, and be too late.
xxx
In the envelope was a newspaper clipping (it was impossible to tell what newspaper) but Sam knew right away what month and year it was from: May, 2000.
Mother of Two Shoots Herself in Harrison, was the title of the article.
Sam closed his door and sat down on the edge of his bed to read it.
Mary Winchester, 35, took her own life this past Tuesday with a .45 colt revolver while her husband and youngest son were out shopping. Her body was found first, tragically, by her nine year old son, as testified by a neighbor (Mr. Reginald Gamble), who saw the boy standing at the window when he ran outside after hearing the shot. Mr. Gamble told reporters that he was in his kitchen when he heard the gun go off and went immediately outside. “I was near the door when it happened so I knew right away where the sound had come from. And as I was running across the lawn I saw the back of the kid’s head in the window. The door was locked when I got there, I had to kick it in.”
Upon entering the house and running to the bedroom Mr. Gamble found Mary Winchester, dead, on the floor of her bedroom. “The kid wasn’t there anymore. I think he must’ve run and hid when he heard the door breaking open, but he stepped in some of the blood and I just followed the footprints. He was hiding in the closet.”
The husband, John Winchester, was unavailable for comment. A funeral will be held for Mary this Friday.
Sam folded up the article and slipped it back inside the envelope as a numbing sensation spread up along the back of his neck. It had never occurred to him that Mary’s death would have made the papers (though it seemed obvious now), and while the article held no new information the black and white nature of it, just facts spilled across a gray page, seemed…unreal.
This had happened. And here was real proof that all of Sam’s sleepless nights and Dean’s brooding silences weren’t rooted in some intangible horror. But in a tragic event, recorded, read, and never revisited.
Sam put the envelope inside his Poe anthology. He couldn’t say why he was hiding it, only that Gabriel had given it to him with a specific purpose and it made him paranoid. If Dean found it and somehow divined Sam’s plan… Sam stood in his doorway and stared at the black and gold binding.
It wasn't going to hurt him. What did he have to lose? A little bit of his naivety maybe, but what was that next to truth? Even if it only gave him the key to John Winchester and nothing else, wasn't a little bit of time spent out of his mind worth it?
Yes. Some answers had to be worth the bad decisions.
He backed into the hallway, lip between his teeth, and turned to go to the bathroom. Whether he was mid-existential crisis or not he really had to pee. Sam bumped the door open with his hip and stopped with his hand on the light switch because Dean was sitting on the couch.
No, curled on the couch really. It gave Sam pause because there were some things Dean did not do and curling was one of them. Dean was a sprawler; he sprawled, took charge of whatever space he was occupying by spreading his limbs all over the place. But there he was, shoeless, knees tucked up, head cradled in his hand, reading a beat-up looking library book and wearing a face like a landmine.
When Sam came out of the bathroom a few minutes later the couch was empty and he was alone in the apartment. Dean's leather jacket and boots were gone.
The book, he noticed, was gone too.
xxx
Sam's favorite childhood memory was an ugly, guilty thing that came back to him whenever he heard Have You Ever Seen the Rain on the radio or caught the cloying scent of strawberry vanilla.
When Sam was twelve his father had disappeared for a week in the middle of June. Sam could remember the freedom from the silence, how he'd stomped down the stairs, the visceral pleasure of being able to slam doors and turn up the television as loud as wanted. It was the loudest quiet week of his childhood and that was why it was also the best.
The last night before John had come home Sam fell asleep on the couch watching an old movie. Dean had been sitting beside him as he drifted off, a warm weight on the other end of the couch, smelling like laundry and Dean's deodorant.
And then the front door was closing and Dean was walking through it, slipping out of his leather jacket, looking white-faced and weary.
"Where did you go?" Sam had asked, his own voice still scratchy with sleep and his head fuzzy. He'd turned off the TV because suddenly the noise was too noisy, too unfamiliar, and Dean was standing over on the other side of the room with his silence wrapped around him like a blanket.
"Nowhere," Dean had kicked off his shoes, he was dressed strangely, provocatively (not that Dean wasn't always being provacative somehow but this...)
"Dean?"
"You ready for bed, man?" Dean leaned against the door jam to the living room, his arms crossed tightly across his chest. "I'm beat, you must be beat. Let's call it a day."
Sam had recognized the misdirection for what it was. But the wall between Dean's unspoken things and the rest of the world was impenetrable-what he needed to hide so badly was something Sam had been trying to solve for years- it was the only secret left between them, and it was, Sam had a feeling, the source of many of Dean’s philosophies.
"Okay," he’d said. And Dean nodded and walked by to climb the stairs.
Sam had caught the scent of strawberry vanilla perfume. It clawed after Dean like a stain and hung in the living room for a minute even after Dean had gone.
Sam was twelve, but he also knew money had to come from somewhere, and he knew Dean wasn't having any luck with his job applications. It was only a suspicion, but Sam never got over the look on Dean's face or the scent of the perfume, the way Dean had hugged his arms around himself like he was trying to keep himself from spilling out all over the place. Or like he was covering up a wound.
Sam never found out for sure what had happened. He was always too terrified of the answer to ask.
xxx
Castiel picked at the scabs across his knuckles with his thumbnail and considered the brand new interruption in his life. It was peering suspiciously at him from across the desk, licking whipped cream from its bottom lip and leaning back against the cushion of its leather jacket, which it shed and donned like a second, optional skin.
Dean had appeared in the doorway of Castiel’s office, huddled deep into that thick leather skin, twenty minutes ago that Friday with two cups of Cocoa in his hands. He walked right in when Castiel caught his eyes and handed one over, taking a seat on the other side. “For lunch the other day,” he explained and shrugged out of his jacket. His legs stretched out beneath the desk and his ankles came to rest against Castiel’s thigh, chilled still from the cold winter air outside.
Castiel should have sat forward and pulled his legs back under him. But he didn’t, he sipped his Cocoa and waited, while the ankles against his leg grew warm, for Dean to speak. Because, clearly, there were words on his tongue, or under it maybe, and Dean was trying to dig them out.
There was a library book in Dean’s lap. Castiel had a feeling that the book was where the crisis had broken. Clearly it had not begun there. Dean’s eye was still tinged yellow and green and blue, though the swelling was gone.
After five minutes of silence, Castiel thought it might be up to him to open the conversation.
“Is there something you wished to speak with me about?”
Dean looked at him, his green eyes flickered down and Castiel self-consciously stopped scratching at his scabs.
“No,” said Dean. “Well, yes…I just,” he put his Cocoa down and waved the book through the air like it was a white flag, then put it gently down on the desk, “Why give me this? Why this book?”
Castiel had a feeling there was actually a whole other question behind there somewhere and he just didn’t have the skill to hear it.
Why Dorothy Allison? Because she spoke to the people who most needed speaking to, because she had been raped and then had spoken alone and she was speaking now so other people didn’t have to. Because he secretly hoped there was another girl in the world, with red hair and brown eyes who’d grown up in a Californian group home named Paradise, who was reading Dorothy Allison instead of remembering the faces of all the people who hadn’t spoken up for her.
Castiel said: “Why not that book?” instead, and watched Dean’s face carefully.
Dean’s green eyes flashed.
“That’s a crap answer,” he said.
Castiel inhaled, there was electricity under his skin, it began in his thigh and buzzed up to his hair follicles. He pushed himself forward in his chair to reach across the desk, his knees brushed Dean’s, and he flipped to the front of the book, to the second page, and then pushed it back towards Dean, keeping his finger wedged in the binding to hold it open.
“This is why,” he said, indicating the last two paragraphs on the second page. “Read it,”
Dean leaned forward, frowning.
--story can become a curtain drawn shut, a piece of insulation, a disguise, a razor, a tool that changes every time it is used and sometimes becomes something other than we intended.
The story becomes the thing needed,”
Dean’s legs, under the table, pushed against Castiel’s. He stared at the page for much longer than it took to read and reread and comprehend. Then he moved slowly, like a fly breaking away from molasses, and took the book back, slid it out from underneath Castiel’s fingers. When the book was back safely in his lap he reached out again and turned Castiel’s hand over to study the scabs again.
Dean didn’t speak. But his fingers whispered, calluses gentle on the sensitive skin and Castiel, already leaning forward, steam coalescing under his chin from the cup between his elbows, used his free hand to pull himself further out over the expanse of the table. It was such a short space anyway, hardly a space at all, hardly a distance, or a foot, an inch.
He brushed his thumb over the blossomed blue and green on Dean’s face.
Castiel would have spoken for Dean, if he could have. But Castiel was a wordless poet, a blank past, always the one on the outside, watching other people hold their tongues, or having their tongues held for them. Castiel didn’t hold his silence because he was frightened or ashamed, or because circumstances had cut away his ability to speak, he was simply empty of stories. Dean, Castiel thought, held his silence because it was what he had seen others do.
Or perhaps he lacked the air? Dean was looking at him directly now, his fingers had found their way between Castiel’s own on the desk, and there were great voids in his eyes that wanted.
If Castiel were to tip the rest of the way, press his mouth to Dean’s and breathe all his wordless breath to Dean’s lungs, would all those stories come spilling out?
Dean was slowly rising out of his own seat, steady like the sun, taking the higher ground. Reaching as if to catch something about to fall.
The book fell to the floor. Loud, like a gavel.
Castiel jerked back and Dean, already out of his chair, stepped away, breathing heavily.
They stared at each other. Castiel knew his own bemusement was mirrored in Dean’s face. They must have been like two moons, risen from different horizons, stunned to find that they weren’t alone in the sky.
“I’ll see you in class,” said Dean. He grabbed his second skin and left with his question still unasked, left the book on the floor and his Cocoa half-finished and warm on the other side of the desk. Castiel sat heavily back in his borrowed chair, stretched his legs out beneath his desk and breathed the dust of the adjunct office.
Shall the dead take thought for the dead to love them?
What love was ever as deep as a grave?
They are loveless now as the grass above them
or the wave.
xxx
He needed some perspective. Forget Dean’s story, he’d been about to overstep an unforgivable boundary for the sake of the gravity in Dean’s green eyes. And this wasn’t some romance or Victorian novel where certain rules could be ignored for the sake of love. This was real life, there would be serious ramifications, his job not the least of those, if he stepped over that line.
Castiel left his office to go seek some advice.
Gabriel’s office was occupied already when he arrived and he nearly crashed into the young man who floated out of the door. He was tall and familiar, wearing a frown that looked sickly and a plaid buttoned shirt, an expression of dazed distraction. He steadied them both with his long fingered hands and mumbled,
“Sorry, wasn’t looking.” Then he made to continue on his way. Castiel almost let him go. But the young man’s stride and the set of his shoulders and the way he shrugged into his canvas jacket made Castiel ask:
“Are you Sam?”
The young man stopped and turned.
“Yes?” he answered and crossed his arms over his chest.
“I am Dean’s”-and somehow he stumbled over another word before he managed “professor,” though after the sentence he could not for the life of him imagine what other word he’d been about to say. Sam’s eyebrows did a complicated dance of thinking.
“Professor Novak,” he ventured eventually. Then he smiled, a wobbly and a distracted smile but it looked honest. Sam held out his hand. “Dean talks about you. Hell he reads for your class, which is miracle enough, but I think he’s actually learning from you.”
“Call me Castiel. Or Cas, if you prefer, it’s a moniker your brother blessed me with.” Sam’s hand was cold and trembling. Castiel squeezed it briefly before letting go. “I do not wish to pry Sam, but are you alright?” It was an inappropriate question, brought up at an inappropriate time but Castiel was shaken and unaccountable for his better judgment, which had apparently abandoned him days ago anyway.
“I…yes I’m alright.” Sam shrugged. “Just got things on the mind, y’know?” His second smile was much more convincing.
He learned that from Dean. That soothing charm, the Winchesters used their faces like armor. Castiel hadn’t yet figured out how to get past it, but he knew that Sam and Dean were close, so he took a risk.
“I only ask because Dean also seems unwell today.”
There was a real expression.
“Really?” Sam looked over his shoulder like he might find Dean standing behind him.
“Sam,” Castiel asked, about to push, maybe solve a mystery or two. He was cut off by the quiet entrance of a second, unexpected party.
“Castiel!” purred Lucifer, “We were just coming to see you. Gabriel told me you teach here now and I thought I would say hello.” Gabriel himself was standing impassively in the background, smiling, his hands in his pockets. Lucifer pulled Castiel into a formal hug and let him go quickly, his hand lingering on Castiel’s shoulder.
Castiel was struck dumb, trying to form a coherent thought over the ringing in his ears. He hadn’t seen Lucifer in a decade. The few tales that had come through the feeble grapevine were disheartening. But even if he hadn’t heard the rumors, looking at Lucifer’s pale face and steady eyes, Castiel could tell he wasn’t the same person.
Or perhaps, more frighteningly, he was exactly the same. His role simply more clearly defined in adulthood.
“I…did not expect,” he cast a desperate, questioning glance to Gabriel. This was their mutual acquaintance? Gabriel kept dangerous company.
Gabriel sucked a caramel into his mouth and shrugged.
“Could I tempt you with some lunch?” Lucifer asked, finally removing his hand. It was like the lifting of a storm cloud, Castiel’s head began to clear.
No.
“I…” Sam, who Castiel had all but forgotten, made an abortive attempt at a sentence and was looking curiously between everyone now. Gabriel caught the boy’s gaze and, behind Lucifer’s back, frowned suddenly in indecision before he took a deep breath.
“Sam,” he said, flashing his pupil a grin. “You should tell Castiel about the Usher house.” He pulled his hands from his pockets to gesture widely with his arms, “I meant to tell him myself last week. I heard it and thought: ‘This is exactly the sort of story Castiel would be interested in,’ but then I plumb forgot. You tell it better anyway. Go on.”
It was a perplexing non-sequitur to say the least.
“The Usher House,” Sam echoed. Lucifer shot a bored stare at Gabriel.
“The story is not that interesting,” he said.
“The Poe story you mean?” Castiel prompted desperately, turning away to look at Sam and put some distance between himself and Lucifer.
“It’s not, I just can never remember the brother’s actual names and it’s on the edge of this swampy pond so I always though it looked like the house from the story. It’s an old abandoned farm house across from the cemetery by my apartment. It was condemned but kids in the area go there to party or to feel adventurous because the place is supposed to be haunted.” Sam, clearly, had not been prepared to play the raconteur. He shifted uncomfortably, his hand clutching something in his pocket.
“Right,” said Gabriel impatiently, “but tell him the reason. Tell him why it’s haunted.”
“Uh,” if anyone there present comprehended Gabriel’s motives it wasn’t Sam. He pulled his jacket closer around himself and decided to comply, he looked at Castiel and smiled ruefully before he began.
“It belonged to these two brothers who inherited the property from their father after he was killed in a hunting accident. They lived together for years, kept the family orchard going. But people thought they were weird because they didn’t have any friends and they never married. They were very close, apparently, and you never saw one without the other. Most of the versions I’ve heard or read suggest that they were…unnaturally close. But,” Sam twisted his mouth, “who knows?
“Anyway, eventually the little brother got sick, some wasting disease, the doctors didn’t know what to call it. But it ate away at the brother’s body and mind. He lost weight, couldn’t leave his bed because of the migraines, couldn’t stand the sight of the sun or certain sounds. He was dying and his older brother hated to watch him suffer. So one night he loaded up his father’s old army Colt and shot his little brother in the head. Then he killed himself.”
A pause rang down the hallway.
“That,” Castiel said slowly, “is horrifying. How did you find out about this?”
“One of our downstairs neighbors,” said Sam. “She made a crack about how close Dean and I were, called me a…see? I still can’t remember the name. And I’ve looked it up about three times.”
“Have you been to see it yet?” Gabriel asked casually, but his eyes flickered to Castiel as if the answer was going to be some private joke between them. “You told me you’d been meaning to check it out.”
“I haven’t yet. It’s one of those things you keep putting off without really knowing why.” Sam checked the time on his cell phone. “I’ve really got to run. Thanks,” he said this in the general direction of both Lucifer and Gabriel so Castiel couldn’t tell who it was actually directed at. He said to Castiel, “Nice to meet you,” and then left, walking quickly, his hand toying with whatever was in his pocket again.
“Well,” said Lucifer, “now that story time is over. What are your plans for the rest afternoon Castiel? I understand you don’t have class for a while.”
“I don’t but one of my students is struggling with the material. I should probably see if I can’t help out.” Castiel accepted another discomfiting hug from Lucifer and then fled for his office. He glanced over his shoulder when he reached the end of the hallway and saw Gabriel looking sharply after him.
Chapter Five